Kundera
I just finished reading El Libro de Amores Ridículos, by Milan Kundera. I read it a couple years ago in English, The Book of Laughable Loves. I like the English title better than the Spanish, and the difference makes me want to learn something about Czech to know what Kundera originally wrote. The book is a collection of short stories, all
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While authors often have protagonists who can be traced back to the author himself, the good ones still populate the world with other believable, complex characters. Take Murakami; like Kundera, his protagonist is very similar from one book to the next, and his books are highly introspective. However, the supporting characters are well fleshed out and feel like real people who go about their life even when not on the page.
While I like some Kundera, he rarely seems interested in telling a story or developing a believable cast of characters (beyond the Kundera stand-in as protagonist). Story doesn't have to be sacrificed in order to deal with complex ideas in a work of fiction, but that's what happens in every Kundera book and story I've read. Either he's decided that there really are only a few types of people in the world, or (more likely I think) he just isn't interested in characters other than himself.
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Maybe I just like it so much because I identify with the Kundera characters. Don't know if you ever heard the story that Carla (did you even know her? my Japan chronology is all tangled up in my head right now) once said I was just like Thomas from Unbearable Lightness, and I took it as a compliment, which, it turns out, is the opposite of how she meant it.
Still, I think your criticism goes a bit too far. I've only read Unbearable Lightness, Immortality and Laughable Loves, and I only really remember the last clearly, so I can't defend him too thoroughly, but for me the non-Kundera characters in Laughable Loves at least are quite well developed, especially considering that we're talking about a collection of short stories. The characters that come to mind right now are the girl who role-plays a seductive hitch-hiker while her boyfriend role-plays the guy picking her up and the older woman who runs into a former lover after realizing her dead husband has been evicted from his grave. You could still probably argue, and correctly, that the male characters in these two stories are better developed.
Maybe I erred in placing so much praise on the development of the characters rather than on the relationships between the characters. I think Kundera has some really great insights here.
Speaking of insights, we come around to this question of the book conveying ideas versus telling a story. I like books stuffed full of ideas. Almost all my favorite fiction can be described as "philosophical". I'm just not bothered that Kundera uses fairly flimsy stories as vehicles for his ideas. The same could be said about Vonnegut, a writer I know we both enjoy (Vonnegut, in fact, has his recurring-character-self-representation Kilgore Trout say something in one of his novels about not needing to populate the world with three-dimensional characters as the world is already full-to-bursting with 3-D humans, and flat characters serve just fine for the stories he wants to tell). Going further, I'm not sure what "story" is all about, what it's purpose is. The first thing that comes to mind, if it's not a vehicle for ideas, is that story is meant to entertain, and I've always found Kundera's books highly entertaining. They make me laugh outloud. Kundera's comedy, his brilliant dry wit, is something else I erred in not praising in the original review.
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Ummm, well...a few days after I first met you, and before you told me about Carla's comment, I was on my way to work when it struck me that you reminded me a lot of Thomas from Unbearable Lightness. Only I kind of observed it in a neutral way--not a compliment or criticism, just an observation. So there you go, two people reached the same conclusion independently, so there must be something there.
The thing that has always drawn me to Kundera's writing is that his male characters can't be judged. Or, at least I can't judge them. It seems a lot easier (for me) to evaluate the behaviour of his female characters (Teresa, the hitchhiker, his 'erotic friend' in Unbearable Lightness, forgot her name), to measure how they think and act against my own set of values. But every time I try to sort out my position, opinion, judgement, whatever, towards his male characters, I get stumped.
And that, I think, is the quality that you and Thomas share. I'm stumped for an opinion, for a moral evaluation. Does that make any sense? I know you won't take it a as a criticism--just thought you might be interested in my insight into the character of Zach.
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